Galactic Bar Fight : The journey from my brain to Launchpad to the App Lab

Last week a VR game I developed solo became available on the Oculus Store to download on the Oculus Quest, It's named Galactic Bar Fight (GBF) and is a sci-fi action game I have been developing part-time for over a years worth of time in broken up chunks.

(People are actually playing it OMG!)

In its first week the game has seen over 2000 downloads or new Users and nearly 1500 active users/ players who've loaded it up at least once. To say I am floored by this response is an understatement and particularly because I didn't really know or feel like the idea was worthwhile it just felt like a fun idea to explore. So I'd like to touch upon the Journey I've had so far with Galactic Bar Fight, how it went from a very rough and undefined concept in my head, to a few fun little prototypes I'd post on my Instagram, became a real project I dedicated substantial time and attention into once I was included in the Oculus Launchpad program while offering the potential possibility of winning a grant and funding , and lastly how I sat in disbelief as I see people review and upload gameplay onto youtube of the experience and leave their comments and feedback . It's been quite the journey and the project has only just begun so let's dig into the road that's gotten Galactic Bar Fight this far.

John Carmack , Dolemite is My Name ,and Oculus Connect 6 (2019)

(John Carmack during one of the live app review sessions)

In 2018 my Creative Director at Relaycars ( Alex Mcclain) came back from the 5th Oculus connect and he told me about one of the coolest scenarios my little game dev brain could imagine. There was a whole segment of Oculus Connect which just centered around John Camrack reviewing Indie VR developers games. Just the idea of it made me excited , a game industry legend picking apart a game of my own? What might he like? What might he hate? What might I learn ? I didn't have a game idea or a project in mind but what I did know is I wanted to make a thing that got judged by John Carmack himself. I eventually got a chance to see the next years live app review session myself at Oculus Connect 6 and Carmack was extremely fair and thorough in his comments and suggestions for each project which only fired me up that much more , I wanted to make something that impressed John Carmack ( ambitious I know). I left Oculus Connect 6 buzzing with excitement about the possibilities of the Oculus Quest, excited about the chance to present something I made to a game dev legend the following year, and believed I might be able to make something... What? No clue yet but I a definite creative pull to figure out what to make for the Quest.

Dolemite is my name featuring Eddie Murphy , Da'Vine Joy Randolph. Keegan-Michael Key, Mike Epps , Craig Robinson , and Tituss Burgess

Dolemite is my name was a fantastic movie and especially inspirational to me as seeing a black movie director ( Rudy Ray Moore) who would do ANYTHING to get his creative vision out to the world resonated strongly with me even before Galactic Bar Fight was a thing. I've always enjoyed creating small projects and I relish the R&D process when making games . There's something special about bringing a rough concept to reality and exploring ways to quickly make it better without hard restrictions on art or design being established. I think the fast-flying pace of R&D is as close to freestyling as we get in software engineering and I've always relished the energy and synergy of working on a small team that tries to formulate and tighten up a core idea fast with the goal to get buy-in from other team members and the higher ups.

Dolemite is My Name alongside movies like SuperFly made me think about how cool it would be to live the experience of being a Blaxpolitaiton action movie star. I could see it in my head , an over the top 70's vibe with big hair, martial arts, guns, and heavy basslines powering the players movement through an experience. A love letter to a time period most media doesn't give much attention too but a place in time i'd love to explore in VR. I knew the spirit of the game I wanted to create but to be honest I need to do more homework on the Blaxploitation film period as a whole before I'd feel comfortable making the game I can picture in my head ( clothes , style, music, colors ,themes ).

My friend and talented artist Chris Coward had this really cool rendering of a Sci-fi diner that kind of informed the creative foundation for the project for me. Structurally it looked like a 50's diner with all the neon colors and technological trappings of a diner from the Jetsons and my first thought was " I'd love to be in a blaster fight there" and from that point merging the experience I envisioned for a Blaxploitation-themed game with a Sci-fi universe sounded appealing and doable so I began to plan my protoype.

Initially, the challenge was that I had two competing visions for what the experience should be I wanted to explore a more loungey /social aspect to the environment and its inhabitants to make the battle breaking out feel more "natural" but also I had to learn how to write guns and AI systems that would work in VR which aren't dramatically different from programming traditional games but do have some small nuances that have to be considered during development. So I prototyped both separately. A simple prototype of a shooting range - a straight forward combat and score situation with a few weapon options :

(First prototype shooting Aliens to one of my favorite Outkast song instrumentals)

and a larger social space where the aliens are partying to establish a sort of cosmic den of scum and villainy:

(This was useful for exploring scale, teleportation , animations, performance, and more)

Obviously, I had to find a way to merge the two different experiences into one and that became a lot easier when I found a convenient starting bar area on the Unity Asset Store that allowed for the space to walk around, deploy AI, provide a decent -sized arena, and which visually captured the tone I wanted to create.

(First VR tour of the core arena area)

Eventually, I had a very simple and broken prototype

For Months I was haunted by an AI bug in GBF , I was trying to use a very popular A* pathfinding package I found on the unity Asset store for my AI and it worked really well....in the editor. Every time I made a build the AI system would break causing my aliens to stand in place and ruin any attempt I made at creating tension or excitement with the combat. I found solace in pouring myself into finding fonts , music, and sound effects that would give the experience more enjoyable but the AI bug bothered and upset quite a bit for a while there.

Oculus Launchpad and the potential for GBF to turn into something more?

After months of stalling due to the AI issue and pulling my hair out about it I noticed the Oculus Launchpad applications were open. Oculus Launchpad is a 5-6 month VR cohort that allows you a chance to develop an application in the opes of being awarded a grant and they say over $250,000 worth of grant money is awarded to creators largely from marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds who are awarded the grant. My friend Cherryl S. Espinoza had told me repeatedly that I should apply for the program and my argument was always "I don't have anything to work on" except this year I did have something to work on and my creative fire was waning due to AI issues so I figured I'd submit the application and if It got accepted it would give me the added motivation to keep building on GBF. What did I really have to lose?

( I GOT into the Launchpad program!)

I couldn't believe it the cohort takes 100 people globally from around the world and I was selected amongst them with Galactic Bar Fight being core to my application pitch ! I was super stoked to work on it and learn so much more over the coming 5 - 6 months of creating.

( Super sonic Rhyme Chamber, the second game I helped to develop during Launchpad and my primary focus)

While I came into the Launchpad Bootcamp weekend focused on Galactic Bar Fight and buttoning it up I also fell in love with all the other creative ideas I heard from talking to all the other excited creators and hearing about their ideas. Juan Morales-Rocha and his pitch for Supersonic Rhyme Chamber(SRC) was the best one though and the two magic words were "Hiphop" , "VR" and " Parappaa The Rapper" for good measure. The idea of SRC was it would put our VR users/ players in the center of a hiphop performance and allow them to embrace the fun and flow of hiphop while also allowing them to be immersed and invested in a world where your words have actual power and you battle for dominance on the mic using the magic of your rhymes.

(An Early Social media post we made illustrating the concept and an early prototype I built)

We spent a lot of time prototyping and exploring different aspects of creating SRC including creating virtual audiences, using IBM Watson for speech-to-text functionality, and a wealth of different input and rhyme-crafting systems we collaborated on and debated about for multiple weekends. I learned a ton from my teammates and also this being the first rhythm game I'd ever worked on I was tested and pushed and I really learned to respect my own craft for game development seeing how fast we were able to iterate and try different gameplay ideas.

As fun as all this was I gave Galactic Bar Fight which was supposed to be the star of this whole cohort experience for me no love and threw it on the backburner. Our Deadline for launchpad was extended from the end of January to early February and with a little over 1 month of development time and seeing SRC being wrapped up by the No Static Games Team I decided I would try to submit GBF as well . Again what did I have to lose?

At this point I hadn'tt worked on GBF for 6 months, There was still a HUGE lingering AI bug issue which killed my experience, I had no on-ramp or tutorial section, no clear instructions on how to play the game and who knows what kind of Oculus OS updates that would break old functionality however what I did have was an experience with a solid 2 minute game loop ( The Launchpad requirements request between 2 and 5 minutes) , and a solid idea of what I wanted this finished vertical slice to be.

(The nice thing about working by yourself is there's a lot less deliberation about what to do which also can be a problem)

So over the course of 1 month I dedicated time to developing a tutorial , writing scripts (first time), recording dialog (first time) , testing , testing, and more testing. Exploring what the tutorial should even look and feel like, figuring out how to teach the players basic game behaviors, while also bug hunting. Oh and I figured out that frustrating AI Issue by basically destroying all my previous AI code and writing a simpler AI pathfinding system using Unitys Navmesh , Not nearly as impressive as the A* solution but it worked 100% more reliably AND IN BUILDS !

Somehow at the end of the 4 weeks with me offering whatever support I could on SRC while focusing on GBF I came up with a full 5-minute build that accomplished all the basic things I was looking for in this prototype. I think it was in the last 2 weeks of Launchpad when Oculus App Lab was announced which was a huge deal for lots of inde VR devs. A way for us to get people access to our games without Going through the rigorous examination it takes to get on the main Oculus Store....well that's not completely true. However It gave me the chance to get GBF not just in front of the teams at Oculus but in front of actual players as well which was very exciting!

Oculus App Lab and ... oh snaps maybe people actually are interested in this?

Getting GBF onto App lab was as annoying as uploading any kind of app to any kind of platform is. Having to take lots of screenshots and promotional cover art in different dimensions and aspect ratios because there are countless places where the game may be shown off and displayed. Writing copy, cutting and putting together a trailer ( first time), filling out the survey which gives you a content rating , and much more.

It took about 5 weeks from my initial upload of the build until my first rejection the cited issues had to do with the experience not pausing when the Oculus Home menu was opened and some places where I marked the app inaccurately during submission. But thankfully upon rejection, the response time with the Oculus team increased dramatically. Over the next week and a half I'd get one more rejection due to my privacy policy and once fixed the app was live and available...live and available? People can play it ?

So full disclosure Galactic Bar Fight has problems and I'm well aware of many of them but excited to find solutions to improve all of them. With that said for me even this initial mini launch has been a resounding success so far. This idea that started as a fun side project I tinkered with for months after I got home from work ( pre-pandemic) is available in the Oculus store now. Literal thousands have downloaded something I mostly just talked about excitedly with my friends and that's unbelievable to me.

(A reddit post I found when searching the game on Google)

I've seen at least two accounts post video walkthroughs, I've seen multiple reddit threads, I've seen third party international markets in other languages displaying the game for downloads in places where I guess the Oculus store may not be as accessible, and i've had a few friends leave me pages of feedback directly. To say I am proud is an understatement as a little kid wanting to make videogames and to hear people say a name I concocted in my head in reference to a project that actually exists makes me overflow with excitement and joy.

So I'm not done with Galactic Bar Fight in fact I'm not done with Oculus Launchpad yet either. We have a demo day where we pitch our idea next week and sometime next week we hear who were the grant winners as well . Whether I win the grant or not I wanted this to be a moment and time capsule where I just reflect on the journey , tribulations, challenges, and joy I've encountered on my quest to get Galactic Bar Fight out to the world in its young and flawed state.

I've learned so much about myself, creating, world-building, characters, and music, the human body , and XR in the past few months and It's been an incredible ride I hope to continue. I wanna say thank you to ALLLLLLLLLLL My friends and mentors who said silent kind words of encouragement to keep going ,my family and their never-ending support for my creative whims, and thank you to all of my fellow games and XR industry folks and all the kind words I've gotten in reviews and seen in forums for the project. This has been a dream come true and I hope I can make something that is not just fun to write about creating but fun for people to play . Thank you so much for reading.